The Law West of Tombstone

Harry Carey plays a combination character in the lead role of The Law West Of Tombstone. He's a quick draw and a deadly shot in the tradition of Wild Bill Hickok and can spin a yarn better than Baron Munchausen. Those talents have served him well in his career in this film and like Judge Roy Bean, he's declared himself the law in the newly forming town of Martinez, Arizona as Mayor and Justice of the Peace.

This was obviously a more ambitious undertaking of a film than what arrived for the movie-going public of 1938. There are whole chunks of this that obviously were left on the cutting room floor and you have to bridge quite a lot to get a coherent story.

Tim Holt plays a young protégé of sorts for Carey, a young outlaw he'd like to see settle down. And Evelyn Brent plays Carey's daughter who doesn't know she's his daughter. But this film is strictly Carey's show. Allan Lane who later was a cowboy hero himself plays a young outlaw who shoots it out with Holt and comes up short and dead.

It's an unusual western and one I'd like to have seen a director's cut of, but that sure isn't likely.

Oftentimes conventional western that regularly heads off in unconventional directions. Harry Carey (senior, not junior) is delightful as very odd character Bill Barker. Head of dancehall girls/prostitutes is named Mrs Mustache! Just read that Harry Carey, Jr is 82 and made more than 40 westerns in his career. Catch his old man in this one for a treat and movie history.

Harry Carey in one of his last starring westerns takes center stage in The Law West Of Tombstone where after the failure of a big con he tried on Gilded Age millionaire Clarence Kolb in New York City returns west to more familiar surroundings. Carey is a fast draw in a pinch, but like a pair of TV brothers named Maverick prefers to talk his way out of a situation.

He's also got a daughter who knows not that he's her father in Jean Rouverol and a protege of sorts in Tim Holt who prefers more traditional type outlawry than con games. Holt and Carey are at loggerheads most of the film, but they like each other. There's a bunch of outlaws, the McQuinn brothers that nobody has any use for hanging around as well.

A lot of the film seems not to make any sense. I think it's because RKO butchered it in the editing department. Holt and Carey are the show, they have some great scenes together.

I'd like to think that after all is settled in this film Carey took Evelyn Brent back from Clarence Kolb, married her and raised a pair of fine sons named Bret and Bart. He sure could have been their old pappy.

Well, Fellini didn't direct this one, but at times it sure seems like it. This is one odd-ball movie, with plotlines that appear out of nowhere and disappear into the same place, character motivations David Lynch couldn't understand, and behavior that sometimes suggests that everyone in the film and everyone who made it was hitting the peyote a little too hard. Harry Carey well plays Bill Barker, and one presumes he is the hero of the piece, though he gets enough undisputed disrespect from respectable characters that sometimes it's hard to know whether he's the moral center or just a none-too-bright gasbag. Tim Holt is good as the Tonto Kid, but everyone else is either not very good or is just mired so deep in the confusion that it's not possible to distinguish their talent. It's almost impossible to disentangle the plotlines, although it's fairly clear that one of them involves Barker's attempts to make a good life for the daughter he never knew. The rest of it is pretty much a jumble, and the confrontations between Barker and the McQuinn gang, and in particular a bizarre game of Russian roulette between Barker and the Tonto Kid simply defy rational explanation. And what in the world was Ward Bond doing in this--not WHY was he in it, but WHAT was he doing? He appears to be channelling his John L. Sullivan character from "Gentleman Jim," funnelled through Pancho Villa. But the purpose and intent of the character are just two of the manifold mysteries of this weird little melange. Just about the strangest thing I've ever seen that wasn't meant to be strange.

There are some horses on dusty trails, cattle and shots fired. But this has little use for rustic scenery, stunts, boulders, stagecoach robberies, ranchers, gold mines and grifting frontier bankers of a B Western. This is urban, for adults, with a train robbery, politics, sex, comedy, iambic pentameter, relationships, surreal twists and the Western storytelling of Carey, Sr. Youthful Holt stirs the drink as he would in Ambersons and Sierra Madre and in his career. Like a B movie this pays less attention to acting, lighting, production values as might a Curtiz, but it has respectable photography and sound with a clear print. Ward Bond, always a star in any role, delivers a memorable cameo. Native Americans here are at least presented with authentic costuming and intelligence, if comedically, not as inarticulate enemies.